paste0 is statistical computing’s most influential contribution of the 21st century

The day I discovered paste0 I literally cried. No more paste(bla,bla, sep=”"). While looking through code written by a student who did not know about paste0 I started pondering about how many person hours it has saved humanity. So typing sep=”" takes about 1 second. We R users use paste about 100 times a day and there are about 1,000,000 R users in the world. That’s over 3 person years a day! Next up read.table0 (who doesn’t want as.is to be TRUE?).